Consumer attitude towards the products "Made in Italy". An empirical investigation

The paper is part of a wider research which aims to study the attitude towards the purchase of products “Made in Italy”, by means of empirical investigations. In a previous paper we investigated the characteristics associated by consumers in related to the products “Made in Italy”, detecting the presence or absence of a willingness to pay and quantifying the amount of “premium price” that the consumers are willing to pay for such products. It is come to light both a robust recognition of the products “Made in Italy”, in terms of high-quality, and a manifested willingness to pay, incrementing the price in a range from 10% to 30%, by consumer-side (Cappelli et al., 2016). For this reason, the objective of the present study is to expand the field survey, for example introducing the concept of “innovation”, trying to verify whether and to what extent the consumers perceive the innovation of the products “Made in Italy” as element of identification, in order to analyze the propensity and the consumer attitude for such products. The research questions addressed are: 1) Does orientation really exist toward the purchase of the products “Made in Italy”? And if it is, 2) Is there an inclination based on the rational consumer attitude?